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I have to learn Oracle SQL for work and am very tempted by the O’Reilly book ‘Oracle PL/SQL Programming’ as it has been so highly reviewed. However, I am unclear as to whether or not PL/SQL is a different language to SQL or if it is just a superset or if it something else. Can someone please help me here? Thanks.
SQL is a data query and manipulation langauge. PL/SQL is a procedural programming language.
PL/SQL is Turing complete language, with syntax for building complicated programmes. It also has a large number of libraries which give it a great range of capabilties. However, undoubtedly its main use is building stored procedures which embed SQL statements for retrieving and working with data. So to that extent PL/SQL is a superset of SQL.
Although in earlier versions of the database the PL/SQL SQL engine lagged behind the database engine so some SQL functionality was not available in PL/SQL. Since 9i Oracle has mad a concerted effort to keep the two in step, and its pretty hard to find anything we can do in pure SQL which we cannot also do in PL/SQL.